Sir T. A year?
1st Doctor. Oh no! Until the morning at the most.
Sir T. Take me to Gervase, Hildreth: quickly, Hildreth.
[Hildreth, Europa, and the Doctors bring St. James's and Sir Tristram together, and support them, that they may see each other while they converse.]
They've killed you, Gervase.
St. J. I wished to set them free.
This war will last a thousand years.
Sir T. For us
The war is over: notwithstanding, speak
Your errand once again. Things in my life
There are I would forget: your message wipes
The world out.
St. J. All the past, both good and ill,
My message clears away.
Sir T. Leaving pure Matter:
I love it!—And a world begun anew:
That moved me most of all:—to launch the world
In space again upon a virgin track,
As though the foul old rut and blood-drenched way
Had never been. I feel it, as I die,
So deeply: actual world, and actual man.
St. J. Yes; let us watch that man! I see him stand
In majesty material, the Nessus-shirt
Of spirit, warp, and woof of legend dyed
In many-coloured Sin, the mordant shame
That cankered life, and clung, a grafted hide,
About his innocent flesh, fallen off, or flayed
With hideous woe, and in its proper filth
Corrupted into naught. Forthwith the world
Begins again, not even a pallid dream
Of legendary pasts to cloud the dawn.
I say it simply;—With the Universe
Man clothes himself; arrayed in time and space,
In darkness and in light, no lamp, no gleam
He follows, for the sun illumines him,
And every sun, his kinsmen in the skies,
The systems, constellations, galaxies.
At home in the empyrean, issuing thence,
His free imagination momently
Remembers flame pellucid, which it was
And will be in the nebula again,
When all the orbs that stock the loins of night
Return into the sun, and fill with seed
Of chastest fire the impassioned womb of space.